He was the genius behind 'A Confederacy of Dunces'

Updated July 2, 2018 at 10:22 AM;Posted February 14, 2018 at 5:00 AM

A portrait of John Kennedy Toole by artist Gabriel Flores of Where Y'Art, as commissioned by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune for its "300 for 300" celebration of New Orleans' tricentennial. (NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)

The Times-Picayune is marking the tricentennial of New Orleans with its ongoing 300 for 300 project, running through 2018 and highlighting 300 people who have made New Orleans New Orleans, featuring original artwork commissioned by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune with Where Y'Art gallery. Today: novelist John Kennedy Toole.

The icon: John Kennedy Toole.

The legacy: Blame Fortuna and her cruel, capricious wheel. There's no better way to explain the intermingling of comedy and tragedy at work in the story of John Kennedy Toole. His "Confederacy of Dunces" wouldn't be published until after he took his own life in 1969. He would therefore never see his book, championed by none other than Walker Percy, hailed as a comic masterpiece. He would never hold the posthumous Pulitzer Prize it would win him. And he would neither live to see his book, with its pitch-perfect capturing of the local patois, nearly universally recognized as the quintessential New Orleans novel, nor its main character -- the long-suffering Ignatius J. Reilly -- embraced as one of the city's most beloved fictional characters.

The artist: Gabriel Flores, WhereYart.net.

The quote: "The tragedy of the book is the tragedy of the author -- his suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-two. Another tragedy is the body of work we have been denied." -- Walker Percy, in his introduction to "A Confederacy of Dunces"

Explore more of Gabriel Flores' work online at WhereYart.net and in person at the Where Y'Art gallery, 1901 Royal St.

TRI-via

Toole was born at Touro Infirmary on Dec. 17, 1937, the son of John Dewey Toole and Thelma Ducoing Toole.

His middle name, Kennedy, is a family name on his mother's side. For most of his life, he was known as "Ken."

From an early age, he was viewed as exceptional by his teachers, and especially by his mother. As he got older, he was known for his sharp wit, which could turn caustic.

Among jobs held by Toole as a teenager were: shelving books at the Latter Library on St. Charles Avenue, typing menus at Wise Cafeteria, clerking at Haspel Brothers clothing factory, stocking shelves at McCrory's on Canal Street and -- not unlike Ignatius -- selling hotdogs at Tulane Stadium.

Toole graduated from Alcee Fortier High School at age 16, having been voted "Most Intelligent." He was editor of the school paper and once wrote a humor column under the pseudonym J. Humphry Mollydock.

In the summer after his senior year, he wrote his first novel, "The Neon Bible." He submitted the manuscript to a literary contest and it was rejected. He put it away and never submitted it again.

The recipient of a National Merit Scholarship, he then enrolled at Tulane University. He graduated four years later with a number of honors, then attended a two-year master's program at Columbia University. He finished in one year.

After Columbia, he taught briefly at Hunter College in Manhattan and the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now ULL) in Lafayette. It was while at USL that he met fellow faculty member Bob Byrne, who -- with his hat and ear flaps, as well as a distaste for ideas lacking "geometry and theology" -- is considered to be the inspiration for Ignatius.

At age 24, Toole was drafted into the Army. While stationed at Fort Buchanan in Puerto Rico, where he taught English to Spanish-speaking recruits, he worked on his new book: "A Confederacy of Dunces." When he returned to New Orleans at age 26, his completed "Dunces" manuscript was in his suitcase.

In 1982, Thelma Toole remembered his return -- and his new book -- in an interview published in The Times-Picayune. "I read it through the next day. And I started to guffaw. When I laugh heartily, I become nauseated. So I had to stop. I thought I might vomit," she said (sounding suspiciously like Ignatius J. Reilly).

He took a job at St. Mary's Dominican College while attempting to get his book published. Simon & Schuster in New York was interested, but they wanted extensive revisions. After two years of back-and-forth, Simon & Schuster decided to part ways with Toole, his book unpublished. He would never submit it again.

By 1968, he was showing signs of what acquaintances described as apparent paranoid delusions. In March of 1969, after disappearing on a two-month solo road trip, he ran a section of garden hose from the exhaust pipe of his car and through a back window, then parked it -- engine running -- in a wooded area just outside Biloxi, Mississippi. And he waited.

Three people attended Toole's funeral at St. Peter and Paul Church: his mother, his father and Beulah Mathews, his childhood nursemaid.

After John Kennedy Toole's death, Thelma Toole took it upon herself to get "Dunces" published. Fatefully, she brought it to local author Walker Percy, who was an instructor at Loyola University, in 1976. He was reluctant to read the manuscript at first -- such requests are common, and the results are rarely worthwhile -- but Thelma Toole was persistent.

"In this case I read on. And on," Percy wrote in his foreword to Toole's book, which was finally published by Louisiana State University Press in 1980. "First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity; surely it was not possible that it was so good."